Air campaign's next phase near

Military officials say U.S. advisers will be needed

Published 7:13 pm, Saturday, September 20, 2014

Washington

The U.S. air campaign to thwart the advance of fighters from the Islamic State has been the easy part of President Barack Obama's strategy in Iraq and Syria.

Soon begins the next and much harder phase: rolling back their gains in Mosul, Fallujah and other populated areas, which will require U.S. advisers to train and coordinate airstrikes with Iraqi forces.

Pentagon officials are more willing than their counterparts at the White House to acknowledge that this will almost certainly require U.S. special operations forces on the ground to call in airstrikes and provide tactical advice to Iraqi troops. "There is no one in this building who does not know that clearing out the cities will be much harder," a senior Defense Department official said in an interview. "That's when the rubber is going to meet the road."

Urban warfare in Iraq has been challenging for the United States. So it will be even harder for the Iraqis, who have so far proved ineffective in combating the Islamic State.

Military officials say they plan to use Iraqi security forces, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and local Sunnis — whom they hope to turn against the militants — to roll back the Islamic State's gain.

Assembling those ground forces, however, will take time. Dempsey said that of the 50 Iraqi brigades whose readiness the United States had closely examined, 26 "were assessed to be reputable partners." Many of the Iraqi units will require training and re-equipping before they are ready to begin a major counteroffensive.

Even with American help, the counteroffensive against the Islamic State may confront an enemy that is rapidly adapting to the U.S. airstrikes by hiding equipment and troops under trees and tarps, and eschewing many electronic communications that U.S. intelligence services can intercept.

And this is just the Iraqi part of the campaign. Attacking forces of the Islamic State in Syria will come later, but first the United States will have to train the Syrian rebels who will fight the militants on the ground.

Dempsey said this week that Pentagon planners estimated that it would take eight to 12 months to train the first 5,400 soldiers; the goal is to train about 5,000 a year, Pentagon officials said.

But those numbers would only be the beginning of the forces the Pentagon believes will be necessary. Dempsey said that American planners estimated that 12,000 personnel would be need to control liberated areas in Syria and restore the border with Iraq.

The CIA recently estimated that the Islamic State had 20,000 to 31,500 fighters, two-thirds of whom are based in Syria. The advance of the militants through Iraq led the larger estimate.

David Shedd, acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at a conference in Washington on Thursday that it was "very difficult to measure the size and capability of the truly committed."

But some seasoned military officials have questioned whether the strategy that Obama and his advisers have developed will be sufficient to defeat the Islamic State.

"Unfortunately, the strategy in many ways will be made up on the fly," said Gen. James N. Mattis, who retired from the Marine Corps and is a former head of Central Command. "It would be better if clearly defined political end states were objectively and persuasively conveyed at the outset."